Cluellage Review: Layered Clues and Real-Time Grabs

How will you use five abstract images to guess 'dandelion'? Hopefully you were able to grab five cards that will help you rather than hinder you.

Published by Hobby World and Magellan, Cluellage is a 20-minute party game, designed for 3-6 players.

Gameplay

Each round, a word card is drawn and set in the center of the table. Each one has six numbered words on it. At the start of the round, each player secretly rolls a die to discover which word they will be trying to get everyone else to guess.

Everyone is then dealt five double-sided cards. During the claiming phase, each player draws the top card they’ve been dealt, flips it over to the opposite side, and then places it in the center of the table simultaneously. Players then choose which card they wish to claim. The first player to cover a card with his hand claims that card and adds it to his claimed pile. Once each player has claimed one card, everyone then draws the next card from their draw pile, flips it, and places it in the center of the table again. This continues until each player has claimed five cards.

Players then try to use the images on the cards they claimed to create a collage that will help the other players guess what their word was. You must use all your cards. While cards may overlap, you may not fully cover a card: at least one-fourth of it must be visible. You cannot flip the card over to its other side — it must remain on the side that was visible when it was claimed.

After everyone has placed their cards, each player’s collage takes its turn being guessed, starting with whoever finished creating theirs first. After everyone has guessed a player’s word, the answer is revealed. Everyone who guessed correctly scores one point, and the player who created the collage earns one point for each correct guess. After everyone’s word has been guessed, a new round begins. The player with the most points after three rounds wins the game.

Review

Cluellage feels pretty familiar. There are a lot of party games about trying to give clues to get players to guess a word. This one doesn’t bring a lot of new ideas to the table, but it does bring an enjoyable level of challenge.

Creating the collages to point to a word was not always easy or intuitive. Since you always have to use all five cards, it often became a question of clever layering and how to represent abstract ideas. The real-time component of claiming cards does feel pretty original to this type of gameplay and does add a fun extra layer to the mechanics.

We appreciated that the game doesn’t overcomplicate the scoring rules, which are quite straightforward. This is an easy game to teach and start playing.

It’s not a particularly pretty game, which is disappointing for such a heavily image-based game. We always would have liked more word cards. They are double-sided, but if you really get into this game, you’re going to get through them pretty quickly and start seeing the same ones over and over again. With the randomness of the picture cards you’re using, the clue giving isn’t going to get that old, but it would be nice to have more word cards to go through before you start seeing repeats. We did, however, really enjoy the different categories of word cards, with the character ones being our favorite.

For party game fans, Cluellage is a fun addition. We ended up playing several back-to-back games of it, and we enjoyed how easy it is to set up each round. A fun game for clue-based game lovers!

Pros: Real-time phase adds nicely to the gameplay, giving good clues feels challenging in a satisfying way, easy to set up and teach

Cons: Could use more word cards, not an especially pretty game

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.